Why the Customer Wins When Sales and Marketing Teams Work Together
By Perry Allison
Many companies struggle to bring their sales and marketing efforts together. Often, there are leaders on each side with different sets of objectives and challenges. In many cases, each side doesn’t talk to the other, or worse, won’t cooperate or respect each other’s contribution. This is a prescription for disaster. Who needs to spend precious energy and time battling with another department inside the company? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to spend that energy on customers and prospects?
At BiddingForGood, we have operated in different ways over the years. For many years, we had two VPs managing their respective departments — one in sales and one in marketing. There were often problems around communication. For much of my time at the company, I have sat at the intersection of sales and marketing, managing both teams. This is arguably a big job and a lot of people to oversee, but the beauty of this structure is that I have had the responsibility and the privilege of making sure that we are communicating well and that each side of the house is aligned and working to support each other. Today, I want to talk about a drip marketing program we instituted through Pardot as a way to create a stronger working partnership between both sales and marketing teams.
We have been a Pardot customer for a couple of years; we’re a Salesforce shop as well. Pardot has enabled us to gain valuable insight about what our prospects are doing and how they are engaging with us. This information is then delivered back to the sales team to highlight the best prospects for them to target. We are always looking to understand who is far enough down the funnel to be sales ready.
One of our business challenges is that there’s our customers episodically use our platform.. We support nonprofits and their fundraising events, but these events/auctions only happen during certain times of the year. This means that for much of the year, our prospects are not as interested in us or our offers. As a result, when a lead/prospect comes to us and is in market, it is doubly important that we engage with him or her as quickly as we can.
Uniting Marketing and Sales Through Drip Marketing
In our normal course of business, our marketing team works hard to generate inbound leads while our sales team’s job is to connect with them, educate them, and hopefully close deals in time for customers to use our software in advance of their event. We have a standard nurturing program in place run by marketing, but our new drip campaign is something quite unique it is a collaborative effort between both sales and marketing.
Here’s how it works: When a prospect fills out a lead form, they are assigned to a sales rep on the team, and then put into the drip program. There is a series of nine emails that are sent approximately every other day to encourage the prospect to talk to us. The emails range from fairly specific product information, such as a link to our product tour, to more light-hearted content, such as a fundraising limerick or a specially written haiku. There is a consistent link to schedule a call inside the emails so that the prospects can easily get on the phone with a sales rep when they are ready to engage. The final email in the campaign uses some humor asking whether the prospect “has been eaten by alligators or is just plain swamped.” Within this last email is a very specific call to action to give us feedback on their status.
It’s important to note that while marketing crafted the emails and Pardot sends them under the rep’s signature, the sales reps are still expected to make calls to their prospects along the way. Our sales team is kept in the loop with constant access to Pardot insights on the prospect’s engagement.
Measuring Joint Success
So how is it working? We’ve had about three months worth of data for this program and the results are promising. The drip campaign is doing much of the engagement work, and this has saved time for our sales reps. The conversion rates, particularly from opportunity to signed business, are substantially higher than our standard conversion rates.
The sales and marketing teams get together regularly to discuss the results of the drip campaign and to tweak it as needed. The teams are truly collaborating and that is a real win for our customers.
Perry Allison is the VP, Sales and Marketing at BiddingForGood. BiddingForGood is a charitable commerce company that provides a unique online auction platform where nonprofits, charitable shoppers and generous businesses converge to create fundraising events and to raise money for important causes.
